Protecting The Neediest Refugees

January 18, 1990|By Bill Frelick.

Throughout history, refugees have fled deteriorating human rights conditions-war, deprivation and persecution. But today the movement of hundreds of thousands of East Europeans and Soviets is being made possible because of an improvement in human rights conditions and liberalized permission to emigrate. Short of a cataclysm, the gates are not likely to close again.

So as the 1990s dawn, we witness a fundamental change in the tide of history, and a consequent demand to re-evaluate our understanding of refugees and their rights.

Emigration is a right. It is a right incorporated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and one that tireless efforts by the American Jewish community, among others, have promoted to break down the doors that prevented movement out of the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The freedom of movement has been seen, correctly, as the right that guarantees all other civil and political rights. Being allowed to leave ultimately protects a person from all other rights violations-when threatened, he or she can leave. And if people have the right to leave, governments become more accountable and responsive to the needs of their citizens. This lesson has been learned in East Germany, and is reverberating in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union itself.

Open borders are likely to make previously closed countries treat their citizens better. They are no longer captive, regardless of failed economic policies and abusive human rights practices. But as the trend toward improved human rights observance continues in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the West will need to reassess the presumptions upon which refugee policies have been based since the Cold War began.

While emigration is a right, immigration is not. Governments do not violate human rights by regulating immigration; border control is recognized as the sovereign right of nations. For people seeking to enter based on their desire for opportunity, family unity or preference, governments have every right to decide who and how many they choose to admit.

The obligation to protect refugees-international law relating to human rights-comes into play only when lives and freedom are at risk.

Millions of people are still fleeing precisely because their lives are put in danger, because they are at risk of torture and abuse at the hands of their governments. These are the people who are in need of international protection. These are the people we have a moral obligation to save.

Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians on the Thai border are in imminent danger of being forced back into the maelstrom of violence by factions vying for power in Cambodia. These include the dreaded Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths of more than a million Cambodians during the mid-`70s. They have already forced at least 23,000 refugees out of UN-assisted camps this year and moved them into areas of Khmer Rouge control.

More than a million Mozambicans have fled the ravages of a force comparable to the Khmer Rouge in its brutality and disregard for human life-RENAMO-and have sought refuge in neighboring countries. Fleeing to poor countries, such as Malawi, their very lives are held in precarious balance, as food dwindles and the international community seems preoccupied with other matters and indifferent to their plight.

Refugee protection should not be a popularity contest. We should protect those refugees in the greatest danger regardless of their ethnicity, politics or national origin.

Yet the enthusiastic response of the West to refugees from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seems not to carry over to most non-European refugees, the overwhelming majority of the world`s 15 million refugees. The United States has reserved 40 percent of its 1990 refugee admission places for the Soviet Union alone-but not a single place for Haitians and only a token for Central Amricans or Africans.

West Germany has opened its doors to ethnic Germans, not only from East Germany but from the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania as well. At the same time, West German officials have been huddling with their counterparts in the European Community to limit access for Third World and Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Turkey welcomed some 300,000 ethnic Turks from Bulgaria this year, but refuses even to recognize as refugees the Kurds who fled chemical attacks in Iraq last year. Busy suppressing its own Kurdish minority, the Turks don`t even recognize the refugees as Kurds. And Iranian refugees in Turkey are in even more precarious straits. Hundreds of them have been forcibly returned to Iran in the last two years, some of whom reportedly have been executed upon return.

The United Kingdom, in its Hong Kong colony, has embarked on a questionable ``screening`` program for Vietnamese boat people, announcing in advance of any adjudication that about 90 percent would be rejected and forced back to Vietnam.

Refugee protection is only meaningful to the extent that it is extended to the least popular and most powerless among the world`s refugees. The United States, Germany and other Western countries have every right to feel good about the changes taking place in the Soviet bloc and about our extending a helping hand to refugees from those lands. But until we treat the neediest of the victims of human rights abuse, our celebration of freedom and opportunity for some will have a hollow ring.